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Deeplinks

Are you scrambling for a clever Halloween costume this weekend? We've got you covered. Here are five ideas for digital rights activists planning to trick-or-treat on Monday.

Facial Recognition Face Paint

Just this week we learned that facial recognition is far more prevalent among local and federal law enforcement than we thought, with at least 26 states using this biometric technology. Of those, 16 states grant the FBI access to their DMV databases. Many large cities have proposed using facial recognition on live camera feeds.

Long-overdue rules protecting security research and vehicle repair have finally taken effect, as they should have done last year. Though the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress unlawfully and pointlessly delayed their implementation, for the next two years the public can take advantage of the freedom they offer. Despite their flaws, the exemptions will promote security, innovation, and competition – and also help the next generation of engineers continue to learn by taking their devices apart to see how they work.

The federal government is set to get massively expanded hacking powers later this year. Thankfully, members of Congress are starting to ask questions.

In a letter this week to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, 23 members of Congress—including Sens. Ron Wyden and Patrick Leahy and Rep. John Conyers—pressed for more information and said they “are concerned about the full scope of the new authority” under pending changes to federal investigation rules.

When Diego Gomez, a biology master’s student at the University of Quindio in Colombia, shared a colleague’s thesis with other scientists over the Internet, he was doing what any other science grad student would do: sharing research he found useful so others could benefit from it and build on it. Indeed, this kind of sharing is the norm in academia, just as it is elsewhere in our increasingly social media-driven online world.

One year ago today, the 100,000th person added their name to a public petition calling on President Obama to categorically reject any attempt to add backdoors to our devices or otherwise undermine encryption.

Since then, crickets.

Obama has promised to reply to petitions on his We the People platform that receive over 100,000 signatures. But the only response our hugely popular petition received was a nonresponse asking for more input.

Since then, the issue has become even more pressing. While the urgency of the Apple encryption battle may have abated, the conversation around forcing tech companies to assist the government in obtaining access to unencrypted data has continued.